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Getting the feel of history
[Times photos: Daniel Wallace]
The Confederate line begins to take shape in the morning fog at last year’s Brooksville Raid. Hours later, the field was filled with nearly 1,500 re-enactors.
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By DAN DeWITT
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 16, 2003
The 23rd annual re-enactment of the Civil War's Brooksville raid will have little resemblance to what really happened. The event puts more emphasis on the sights and sounds of life in the 1860s, one re-enactor says.
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BROOKSVILLE -- Spectators can learn a lot about history at the annual re-enactment of the Brooksville Raid, just not much about the raid itself.
The 23rd annual re-enactment this weekend will look like a scaled-down Gettysburg, with thousands of uniformed soldiers facing one another across an open field. Most of them will be Confederates, because that's the chosen side of most local re-enactors.
In the real raid, the great majority of the 300 or so soldiers fought for the North. They were more interested in killing livestock than rebels. The closest thing to a battle came when one group of Confederates mistakenly ambushed another.
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Other things to do in Hernando
Hernando County has plenty to offer beyond the Brooksville Raid's beating drums and blasting cannons. Here are a few suggestions: |
"We do stretch the truth a little on this battle," said re-enactor Robert Niepert of Winter Garden. "It's way larger than the actual raid."
The real lessons of the re-enactment are faithfully re-created sensations, he said: the taste of fry bread, the sight of a blacksmith forging a horseshoe, the sound of artillery fire.
Confederate re-enactors fire at Union soldiers during last year’s raid. Most re-enactors choose to be Confederates, but in the real battle, the Union had the larger force.
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"We're playing with real weapons and real powder here, and a cannon will still blow your head off within about 20 feet," said Mike Hardy of Apopka, a Confederate major general who is coordinating the battle plan.
"What we offer is more of a living history," Niepert said.
The participants have done this well enough during the past 22 years that the Brooksville Raid has become one of the largest, if not the largest, battle re-enactments in Florida. It at least rivals a similar event in Olustee in northern Florida, the site of the state's only full-scale Civil War battle.
The Brooksville Raid is the favorite of the state's re-enactors, according to a poll Niepert conducted on his Web site.
"That wasn't even close," he said.
A re-enactor holds a replica of an 1853 Enfield musket, a British gun commonly used during the Civil War.
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"The Brooksville Raid is very, very important to re-enactors in Florida," Hardy said.
The event will attract about 2,500 re-enactors and 20,000 spectators, said Virginia Jackson, executive director of the Hernando Historical Museum Association and one of the event's organizers since it began.
The Raid includes battles Saturday and Sunday, and several related activities: an education day for local children Friday, a formal dance called the Blue/Gray Ball on Saturday night and a baseball game played according to the rules of the time, which allowed, for example, four strikes per batter.
Throughout the weekend, more than 100 vendors -- called suttlers, after the Civil War term for camp followers -- will offer a variety of period-appropriate goods, such as kettle corn and hand-sewn clothing.
More suttlers will be at this event than were soldiers at the first re-enactment, Jackson said.
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Dressed for the occasion, New Port Richey residents Jessica Nichols, left, and Dawn Fustaino help Timary Nichols up onto hay bales for a better look at last year’s Raid. |
About 50 re-enactors showed up for the 1981 Raid at a farm north of Brooksville owned by former Hernando County commissioner Murray Grubbs. By 1990, it attracted more than 500 participants and several thousand spectators, forcing a move to the larger Sand Hill Scout Reservation, east of Weeki Wachee.
The location has become one of the event's biggest assets, Jackson said, mostly because it has plenty of room for parking, the army camps, the suttlers' booths and the giant tent where the ball is held. Also, the fields are ideal for watching and staging the battles.
"It's like an amphitheater. Wherever you stand, you can see what's going on," Jackson said.
"There's plenty of room to move the men around the field," said Niepert, a cavalry commander. "We can actually get up to a good gallop on those fields."
Hardy said he has researched Confederate battle manuals to duplicate troop movements and formations used at the time. All the soldiers wear exact replicas of Civil War uniforms.
"These are uniforms, not costumes," Hardy said.
Re-enactors even talk, as much as possible, like 19th century soldiers.
"We are able to re-create everything. People can see how a soldier, and in some cases how his family, would have lived and dressed," Hardy said.
That -- not glorifying the Southern cause -- is the appeal of re-enacting, he and Niepert said.
"There might be people out there that think we're a bunch of guys with pot bellies and Confederate flags trying to resurrect the South, but that's not true at all," Niepert said. Many re-enactors are equipped to represent soldiers on both sides, he said.
"I enjoy being out there and camping with my friends. I enjoy the living history aspect. I enjoy doing things with my horse and trying to educate people about a period of history that a lot of people have forgotten about," Niepert said.
The Brooksville Raid is one of the largest Civil War re-enactments in the state. About 20,000 spectators are expected this year.
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An exact re-creation of the raid probably wouldn't
hold the public's interest.
In late June 1864, about 240 Union soldiers disembarked from ships at the mouth of the Anclote River in what is now southern Pasco County but was then part of Hernando.
They marched north while a small group of Confederates, mostly old men and boys, fired on them sporadically, said Roger Landers, a Brooksville historian.
Near Brooksville, the Union soldiers burned the property and killed the livestock of several large landowners who were important suppliers to the Confederacy.
"In the latter part of the Civil War, Florida became the bread basket of the south," Jackson said. Hernando shipped out large quantities of beef, cotton, sugar and salt, he said.
The Union soldiers marched west, eventually meeting their boats at Bayport and escaping. The small, makeshift squad of Confederates waited for them near the site of the Scout reservation but ended up attacking another group of Confederates that had been summoned from Tampa.
It is likely that one of the two Confederate casualties from this engagement was a result of a father shooting his son in the arm, Landers said.
"It's pathetic," he said.
That does not mean he or other historians have any problem with re-creating the raid on a grander scale.
"Absolutely not," Landers said. "This is more of a display of skirmishing and what battles may have been like."
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a history professor at the University of Florida, said that Southern re-enactors are attracted to the "Gone With the Wind lifestyle probably without much consciousness about race. . . . These are people's ancestors, and they want to make them look as good as possible."
"There's no harm in any of it," Wyatt-Brown said. "It's probably useful in a way, even if this particular battle didn't amount to anything."
If you go
The Brooksville Raid re-enactment will be held Saturday and Sunday at Sand Hill Scout Reservation, State Road 50, Spring Hill. The reservation is about a mile east of U.S. 19 on State Road 50. Admission is $5 for adults (18 and older); $2 for children (ages 6 to 17); free for children 5 and younger and Scouts in uniform. Spectators may bring chairs; rental chairs also will be available for $2. Coolers will be permitted on the grounds, but alcohol is prohibited. For information, call (352) 799-0129. Web site at www.brooksvilleraid.com.
SCHEDULE:
Saturday
9 a.m. -- Camps open to public
10 a.m. -- Battalion drill
11 a.m. -- Ladies tea
Noon -- 1860s baseball game
2:30-4 p.m. -- Battle re-enactment
4 p.m. -- Medical scenario
5:30 p.m. -- Camps close to public
8 p.m. -- Blue/Gray Ball
Sunday
9 a.m. -- Camps open to public
9 a.m. -- Church service
10:30 a.m. -- Battalion drill
1:30 p.m. -- Grand review
2:30 p.m. -- Battle re-enactment
4:30 p.m. -- Camps close to public
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